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News

September 5, 2017

In spring 2016, UC Berkeley’s first Foundations of Data Science course attracted around 300 students. This semester, nearly 1,000 have enrolled — and university officials are working to create a data science undergraduate major, the first new major for the College of Letters & Science in at least 16 years.

September 1, 2017

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ kicked off the campus’s Free Speech Year on Thursday with an address at the Berkeley Forum, a student-run organization that hosts discussions and debates with major public figures.

To the surprise of scientists, bacteria can act as an aphrodisiac for one-celled marine organisms notable for being the closest living relatives of all animals. This is the first known example of bacteria triggering mating in a eukaryote, a group that includes all plants and animals.

August 30, 2017

Breakthrough Listen, an initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe, has detected 15 brief but powerful radio pulses emanating from a mysterious and repeating source – FRB 121102 – far across the universe.

August 23, 2017

Historic Wheeler Hall, a 100-year-old classroom and office building that’s been the site of famous speeches and campus protests, reopens today after a major, year-long overhaul. But you’re not likely to see many of the changes; they’re hidden behind the walls.

August 22, 2017

Hamilton — the hit Broadway show that blends hip-hop, pop, R&B and history to tell a diverse new generation the story of the country’s founding — is bringing together incoming students as the heart of this year’s On the Same Page program at UC Berkeley.

August 21, 2017

Can’t chase Monday’s solar eclipse to the zone of totality on Monday? Fog blocking your view in Berkeley? UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science is offering an alternative: Live feeds of the action from spots along the path of totality.

August 17, 2017

The total solar eclipse – the first visible from the continental U.S. since 1979 – will traverse the entire country in a band about 70 miles wide, beginning on the Oregon coast and ending 90 minutes later off the coast of South Carolina.

A mutation that helps make cells immortal is critical to the development of a tumor, but new research at UC Berkeley suggests that becoming immortal is a more complicated process than originally thought.

August 16, 2017

To Angela Neally from Long Beach and Dani Goland from Israel, the letter C they were forming on the football field Tuesday night with some 7,000 other new students might have stood for “Ccccccold!” Temperatures dipped and fog swirled around California Memorial Stadium, unlike the warm summer evenings many knew back home. But at about 9:15 p.m., as it finally took shape, there was no doubt what the big C meant to all the incoming UC Berkeley students who created it.

August 15, 2017

Supported in part by the College of Letters & Science Advisory Board and College Leadership Fund donors, an ambitious program to introduce all 9,500 incoming students to UC Berkeley launches Tuesday, Aug. 15. Golden Bear Orientation (GBO) — eight jam-packed days of training sessions, ice breakers, tours and academic programming — is expected to be the largest orientation of its kind at a U.S. university, in terms of the number of students participating.

August 9, 2017

Two years in the making, an ambitious program to introduce all 9,500 incoming students to UC Berkeley launches next Tuesday, Aug. 15. Golden Bear Orientation — eight jam-packed days of training sessions, ice breakers, tours and academic programming — is expected to be the largest orientation of its kind at a U.S. university, in terms of the number of students participating.

August 8, 2017

The Eclipse Megamovie project has released an app that makes it easy for citizen scientists with smart phones to photograph the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse and upload the images to the project, a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and Google to provide a lasting photo archive for scientists studying the sun’s corona.